...My lawyer friend, who has a wife and two children, hates his job and is always talking about leaving it so that he can pursue an entirely different profession, but he simply can't figure out how to make the switch. I feel for him. Having clambered up his ladder, he won't easily get down. But I also want to tell him what Jean-Paul Sartre said about the allure of imaginary lives:
Sartre thought we should focus on what we have done and will do, rather than on what we might have done or could do. He pointed out that we often take too narrow a census of our actions. An artist, he maintains, is not to be "judged solely by his works of art, for a thousand other things also help to define him." We do more than we give ourselves credit for; our real lives are richer than we think. This is why, if you keep a diary, you may feel more satisfied with the life you live.
And yet you may still wonder at the particular shape of that life; all stories have turning points, and it's hard not to fixate on them. Sartre advanced those ideas in a lecture called "Existentialism Is a Humanism," which he delivered in Paris in 1945, when he was only locally famous. On arriving at the venue, he discovered that he would have to push through a brawling crowd that had gathered in a sort of mini-riot. ("Probably some communists demonstrating against me," he speculated, according to Annie Cohen-Solal's "Sartre: A Life.") He considered leaving the event but then decided to press on, spending fifteen minutes making his way to the front, receiving a few kicks and blows along the way. The lecture was a sensation and made Sartre an international superstar. That might not have happened if he'd decided, reasonably, to leave...
A man commits himself and draws his own portrait, outside of which there is nothing. No doubt this thought may seem harsh. . . . But on the other hand, it helps people to understand that reality alone counts, and that dreams, expectations, and hopes only serve to define a man as a broken dream, aborted hopes, and futile expectations.
Sartre thought we should focus on what we have done and will do, rather than on what we might have done or could do. He pointed out that we often take too narrow a census of our actions. An artist, he maintains, is not to be "judged solely by his works of art, for a thousand other things also help to define him." We do more than we give ourselves credit for; our real lives are richer than we think. This is why, if you keep a diary, you may feel more satisfied with the life you live.
And yet you may still wonder at the particular shape of that life; all stories have turning points, and it's hard not to fixate on them. Sartre advanced those ideas in a lecture called "Existentialism Is a Humanism," which he delivered in Paris in 1945, when he was only locally famous. On arriving at the venue, he discovered that he would have to push through a brawling crowd that had gathered in a sort of mini-riot. ("Probably some communists demonstrating against me," he speculated, according to Annie Cohen-Solal's "Sartre: A Life.") He considered leaving the event but then decided to press on, spending fifteen minutes making his way to the front, receiving a few kicks and blows along the way. The lecture was a sensation and made Sartre an international superstar. That might not have happened if he'd decided, reasonably, to leave...
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